The month-long Chinese Chorizo Festival is back for its third year to honor a local historic delicacy in a state-wide celebration.
In 2022 the Chinese Chorizo Festival made its debut after Feng Feng Yeh, artist and chef, established the Chinese Chorizo Project. She created the festival to represent the solidarity Chinese chorizo has made throughout the 1800 and 1900s.
Chinese chorizo was found in over 100 grocery stores right here in the Tucson barrios for more than 100 years. What is special about the food is how there isn’t a specific recipe that one follows; it was a combination of scraps of meat, Mexican spices and red wine.
In today’s world it’s hard to find Chinese chorizo, but Yeh has been reviving the delicacy for the past two years.
Since the Chinese Chorizo Festival began, over 1,000 pounds of pork-based and vegan mushroom-based Chinese chorizo have been donated to more than 50 restaurants, food vendors and cultural organizations every year in Tucson and Phoenix.
The festival consists of special events throughout Pima County offering tasty and unique recipes containing Chinese chorizo for the communities to experience. It also highlights the Mexican and Chinese immigrant solidarity which blossomed through the making of this delicacy.
A new addition to the festival is a cocktail competition where local bartenders create drinks inspired by Chinese chorizo. Yeh is also developing a Chinese grocery store pop-up installation at the Tucson Museum of Art in the Casa Cordova building. The art installation will have products made by Yeh with stories under the pieces describing parts of history from the different Chinese grocery stores that once existed in the Tucson neighborhoods.
Along with the festival and art pop-up insulation, an 11 foot mosaic sculpture named The Most Sacred Heart of the Barrio will be created by local artists and community members. The sculpture is going to be of two Chinese chorizo sausage links to honor the community bonds made from the historic delicacy.
List of events for the 3rd Annual Chinese Chorizo Festival are found here.
Feng Feng Yeh
Feng Feng Yeh (she/her) is a chef and emerging multi-disciplinary artist who explores identity, feminism, and activism, under a provocative lens of sensuality, nostalgic camp, and comedy. She is the brainchild of the Chinese Chorizo Project, a MOCA Tucson and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts awarded project centered on the revival of the Chinese Chorizo, a lost historic food symbolic for community solidarity. Through collaborative culinary and cultural arts, the Chinese Chorizo Project recognizes the contributions of immigrants in America. Thanks to these efforts, October 2023 & 2024 was named Chinese Chorizo Month by the Pima County Board of Supervisors. Yeh is the first recipient of the Tucson City of Gastronomy Food Visionary Award. Featured in Vogue and WWD for her NYC based womenswear line Savant, Yeh’s first exploration in multi-dimensional productions evolved to an art utilizing food as a vehicle to explore ideas of consumption and its related performance, spectacle, and response. Providing an intersectional perspective between the connections of collaboration, art, food, history, and humanity, Yeh hopes to uplift underrepresented communities across boundaries.